Don’t read this if you are a fantastic innovator!

Over the past few years, I have worked with many people in their entrepreneurial journey. It becomes really obvious what skills and gaps that these people have, but generally they need their skills and gaps pointed out to them. I have developed a short discovery tool to help in this and you can gain free access to this here.

I came across a 4 position model based on the preference you have to doing things – and have designed a quick diagnostic to give some quick feedback that you may find useful. It is based on the premis that the majority of us have a preference to the type of activities that we undertake when we are problem solving or innovating. Having identified this preference we can actively seek out others to help us in other areas or indeed adapt to force ourselves into these other areas.

Investigator

An investigator is the person who prefers to complete a thorough research project prior to starting the problem solving or innovation process.

Ideator

An ideator is the person that comes up with lots of different ideas that can help solve the problem in hand or business issue.

Decider

A person that loves making the decision on which direction they want to lead the process forward. Usually can switch between a micro and a macro view.

Implementer

A person that absolutely wants to drive to deliver an outcome. Is motivated by succesful delivery and is tenacious in achieving it.

Having understood the type of person you are, we need to be cogniscent of what is going on in the other boxes.

For example,

I am an Ideator. I easily get frustrated by people needing to understand everything, believing that we can discover this on the journey. I love this phase so much, that sometimes moving out of the Ideator phase to Decider and Implementer is hard.

Similarly, an Implementer will just want to get on and deliver something and may struggle with what is going on for the Ideator or Investigator but with that energy to deliver, may miss something fundamental.

Again – give the tool a try and see what you discover. You will be presented with 4 figures which represent your propensity to act in each of the 4 zones. The highest figure represents the ‘most like you’, the lowest. – the ‘least’ like you. As with any of these type of tools, it is a start of a discussion point.

Suggestion

Perhaps you could use this in a team meeting and discuss the results with colleagues? Perhaps you could do this as a project management group, and understand who thrives when in what stage of the project?